No, not the song by R.E.M., but the best orange soda ever made. I had one this morning. It was good and brought back some childhood memories. You can still get this wonderful elixir in glass bottles (I always keep one handy, you never know when you will get into a fight) from your local Wal-Mart.
Orange Crush is smooth and goes down easy. It has strong taste of orange with an orange finish. There, how is that for a review?
–Walter
Lindemans Merlot. 2007. Bottom of the wine rack. Any convenience store with wines and decent foot traffic. No chilling necessary and didn’t even need to breathe. Man this is good bargain booze. Also, I find it might b a little difficult getting pasty faced on Walter’s Ozarka and G2. 
j.lincoln
So, G2 is made by Gatorade, but they put a picture of their logo instead of saying Gatorade. I picked up a bottle of Orange G2 at the Wal-Mart the other day. It was ¢.98, which if you know me, is the kind of price I like to pay for a beverage that comes in a 32 fl oz bottle. The draw of this is the low calorie aspect of it. 25 calories per serving, 4 servings per bottle. If we crunch the numbers, that works out to 100 calories for 32 oz of what I consider a tasty beverage.
The orange flavors are quite nice. There is plenty of sweetness to make this a nice sweet drink if you like that, but it does quench your thirst and does not leave that lingering desire for more liquid in your mouth. It still has that Gatoradeness to it, if you drink Gatorade (like I do), you’ll know what I’m talking about. This does not contain fruit juice, and it does use high fructose corn syrup. That means guys like The Drinkina…errr Dave won’t come and steal it from you. I recommend this to anyone who is looking for a sports drink to replenish those electrolyte’s, but not down a bunch of calories in the process.
–Walter
Now some people call me a fool for buying bottled water when the tap water tastes just fine. Well, they are wrong. The tap water in my city must be filtered through dirt before it reaches my house. I might as well drink out of the garden hose (remember when we did that as a kid, and we’re happy to have it?)
Sorry, back to the water. Ozarka has found and bottled water from some of the finest springs on God’s great earth. It’s clean, tastes good and goes down smooth. You don’t have to add things like lemon, sugar or koolaid to mask any bad flavors. Heck, you don’t even have to boil it before you drink it! They package it in a nice 16.9 oz bottle. This makes it easy to use those flavor packets (more on that later) in your water.
Now we buy cases of this stuff at Costco for around $5. It comes with 36 bottles per case, so that works out to about ¢.14 a bottle. That is money well spent my friends, money well spent…
–Walter
After watching my esteemed colleague, umm the Drinkinator, wolf down some Maruchan noodles the other day I could not help but think. Ramen Noodle Soup Juice. Tastes good, goes down easy and is likely to remain “recession proof”for many years to come.
Heh, so much for those elitist taste buds.
j.lincoln
Back in the day, there was sugar. It came from beets, or it came from cane. It wasn’t particularly shelf-stable, but it tasted good, and we liked it.
But then chemists learned how to make fake sugar using corn starch, centrifuges. hydrocones, ion-exchange columns, back-bed reactors, enzymes from genetically-modified bacteria and fungi, and other fancy high-tech stuff an average Joe like your’s truly barely can spell, let alone comprehend. Somehow (I can’t imagine how) the process was cheaper than just making sugar, the result was more shelf-stable and as a bonus the fake sugar was liquid. So they took their creation to the soda industry. “Hey guys!” they said, “We can save you money!” Now, industry is about two things. Making money, and not spending too much of it in the process. So, the soda industry dropped sugar in a heartbeat, and began “educating” its customers to the values of the new “high-fructose corn syrup” (HFCS). Other sugar-sweetened beverages followed suit, and soon, sugar was almost completely abandoned by the beverage industry.
The industry was quick to claim, and still does, that HFCS was, and is, no different either chemically, or in terms of flavor than sugar. What a load of crap! Beverage aficionados can tell the difference. The industry was also quick to claim that HFCS is a “natural” product. B-frickn’-S! Give me sugar. If you are going to sell me sugar-water, I expect pure cane sugar, and nothing else. No high-fructose corn syrup, no “inverted” sugar: Pure Cane Sugar.
To the beverage industry: You are on notice. The “Drinkinator” will not drink, nor will he grant any positive review to, any beverage made by the adulteration of corn starch to produce fake sugar.
Barefoot Merlot is in my top 5 list for cheap wines. Immediately after uncorking, the wine is a bit bland; a short breathing period seems to open up the flavors quite a bit. The aroma is mild, with weak berry and leather notes. The flavor is pretty assertive. It is medium-bodied, with blackberry and mocha notes, well-structured tannins, and a moderately lengthy finish.
Basically, it’s pretty darned good for less than a 10 spot. 
j.linc
I can’t imagine Captain Jean-Luc ordering a cup of this dreck. Earl Grey is supposed to get it’s flavor from just a hint of bergamot oil. This stuff tasted like someone just threw a rotten bergamot orange in a cup and let it steep. For a couple of hours. The perfume flavor completely overwhelmed the tea, and it wasn’t a likeable flavor to begin with. If I had to settle for a mainstream off-the-shelf brand of EG, I’d pick up a box of Twining’s. It’s not as strong a tea, but then again…with EG, that’s not necessarily a fault.
bubbalikesit74
Well, me and the boys were chatting ’round back in the alley one day and decided that we all love to drink. Now, we’re not just talking about booze, but beverages in general. You kids would know this as that sugary crap they call soda. Not what I had back in my day. Kids and their fancy bottled water…
Anyway, we all agreed that we should share our vast knowledge with the rest of the world, or at least those on the Internet and the Robust Beverage Society was formed. We’re not accepting new members into the society. We don’t know you, and we probably wouldn’t like you…unless you’re buying! Take what we say with a grain of salt, remember we’re just average joe’s like you and this is only our opinion. If you want to run your mouth like us, then get your own blog.
So, on behalf of myself (Walter for those of you who don’t view the ENTIRE website), James, Dave the “drinkinator” (moron wanted me to put that), and Bubba, welcome!